If you installed one of those Excel security patches issued by Microsoft earlier
this week, you may want to double-check your math.

That's because a bug in the recent MS08-014
patch is causing Excel to return zeroes instead of the correct number when
certain types of macros are run within the program.

The issue, which does not affect all Excel users, messes up calculations for
Office Excel 2003 users who are grabbing data such as stock quotes or inventory
levels from sources in real time and plugging them into an Excel array.

"If you have applications that leverage Real Time Data sources in Visual
Basic for Applications functions, we recommend that you perform additional testing
before initiating a wide deployment of the update," Microsoft said in an
updated frequently-asked-questions section of the bulletin on the MS08-014 update.

As a workaround, Microsoft
recommends that users run affected Real Time Data functions on individual
cells within the spreadsheet, rather than throughout the whole array.

Microsoft warned
users of the problem late Thursday, and the company is working on a fix.
The company's public relations agency could not immediately say Friday when
this update might be released.

Ironically, Office 2003, Service Pack 3 users are not affected by the security
flaw that is fixed with this patch, but Microsoft is still pushing this update
out to these customers. Microsoft says that this is happening because the update
files have higher version numbers than the existing files on Service Pack 3
systems.

Microsoft released four critical security patches on Tuesday, all related to
Office. Of these, the MS08-014 update is one of the most important. It fixes
a publicly disclosed flaw in Excel that hackers had been exploiting in online
attacks since the middle of January.

IDG News Service

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine